Topological dynamics of gyroscopic and Floquet lattices from Newton's laws

Abstract

Despite intense interest in realizing topological phases across a variety of electronic, photonic and mechanical platforms, the detailed microscopic origin of topological behavior often remains elusive. To bridge this conceptual gap, we show how hallmarks of topological modes - boundary localization and chirality - emerge from Newton's laws in mechanical topological systems. We first construct a gyroscopic lattice with analytically solvable edge modes, and show how the Lorentz and spring restoring forces conspire to support very robust "dangling bond" boundary modes. The chirality and locality of these modes intuitively emerges from microscopic balancing of restoring forces and cyclotron tendencies. Next, we introduce the highlight of this work, a very experimentally realistic mechanical non-equilibrium (Floquet) Chern lattice driven by AC electromagnets. Through appropriate synchronization of the AC driving protocol, the Floquet lattice is "pushed around" by a rotating potential analogous to an object washed ashore by water waves. Besides hosting "dangling bond" chiral modes analogous to the gyroscopic boundary modes, our Floquet Chern lattice also supports peculiar half-period chiral modes with no static analog. With key parameters controlled electronically, our setup has the advantage of being dynamically tunable for applications involving arbitrary Floquet modulations. The physical intuition gleaned from our two prototypical topological systems are applicable not just to arbitrarily complicated mechanical systems, but also photonic and electrical topological setups.